A-Rod's Quest For Spiritual Fulfillment





(image via jaredran)

Look at all the drama surrounding A-Rod's earnest if terribly over-sharey search for spiritual fulfillment among the heathens. It reminds me somewhat of Woody Allen's Mickey Sachs character in Hannah and Her Sisters, only, like, with Guy Oseary as the neutral god. Instead of helpful Hare Krishna's or priests speaking soberly of conversion in melancholy tones, we have a Disneyfied interpretation of Kaballah -- aka, "that disgusting voodoo (Averted Gaze)" -- and Madonna *allegedly*. And, of course, positively citric charges of betrayal and revenge-spending. But still A-Rod quests on after his own private metaphysical field of dreams to supplement his beefy hunk of physical junk. (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment)

Et voila tout: Madonna, too, dreams of achieving some manner of spiritual Nirvanna, of immortality, among the squares. What is Fame but immortality mitigated by Materialism? But Materialism ends abruptly at physical death. Endlessness ultimately thwarted; you can't, as they say, take it with you. But, as the Material Girl sings, in the over-produced La Isla Bonita, of her Kierkegaardian heropass, "Tropical the island breeze, All of nature wild and free, This is where I long to be, La isla bonita." So goodam true! And what, dear reader, is A-Rod after all if not a stunning mocha-colored isla of bonita to Madonna's rugged-legged "wild and free"? Just how punk rock is that?

The existential mutability of Madonna -- from her gay latin dancer period to the Spanish baseball player period to her Abba-infused 70s period to her awful Pilattes-rapping period to her African-American basketball player period to her British landowning aristocrat period back to the Spanish athletes -- has always suggested spiritual restlessness, a Waughian world-weariness.

There have been, to be sure, reports of A-Rod getting spiritual counselling from Rabbi Michael Berg of the Kabbalah Centre director (see above). And simultaneous to that, Madonna sought advice in her divorce from that spectacularly unsuccessful film director, Guy Ritchie.

Then there was talk about "soulmates (He said, 'She's my f--king soulmate, dude,')." Duuuuude. The Corsair understands. There is, we cannot fail to note, a Zen-like spirituality to baseball. Perhaps A-Rod's yearnings for the Infinite -- or at least "the Intimate" -- began in the interval of the pitch. Always searching for the perfect game. Baseball, they say, is what happens between the lines, or, in the case of Madonna, beneath the frock (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment).